Friday, May 21, 2004

Honey Nipples

Today's little incident bears noting. The president of a large Seminary in Texas came to the JSA for a tour. Since I'm the religious expert on post, I got to serve as the escort for the tour. This was a small VIP tour consisting of the VIP himself, his wife, a chaplain friend of theirs from somewhere else in Korea and his wife. with the tour guide and me we had a grand total of 6 people on the tour. Well, when you have a tour that small,it allows you a little more flexability than a big group because you can move a little quicker. There was another tour just behind us at the JSA consisting of two full bus loads so I knew I could deviate from the normal tour stuff just a bit and it would be easy to stay ahead of them with little effort. Near the end of the normal tour we drive by the Bridge of No Return and people take photos from the bus, but we don't usually get out. Well, the group behind us was clearly visable from the Bridge, at checkpoint 3 so I let the VIP group get off the bus to take some pictures next to one of the border markers. We approached the bridge and right where we were going to stand for photos was sitting an absolutly huge snake. It had to be over 5 feet long and was every bit as thick as my wrist. He just kind of watched us but didn't move. So I decided to get a little "Steve Irwin" on him. As I approached he began to slither down his hole. I reached out to take him by the tail and do the herpatologist act when I remembered Honey.

Honey is a rather large dog that belongs to one of the officers in the battalion. Honey was out playing in the local rice fields last year when she was bitten by a snake. It didn't seem all that bad at first but it nearly killed her. The nice part was that the skin on the area surrounding the bite began to literally rot off her leg. It just wouldn't heal no matter what the vets did for her. Finally, they had to graft some skin from her belly onto her leg to stem the disintegration of her flesh. Remember, dogs have about 5 or 6 nipples down each side of their belly. So Honey, to this day has several nipples on her leg. Not only that but the hair is entirely different. As a result, she has a band of long hair with nipples around her hind leg. Well, I don't really want nipples on my arms so instead of grabbing the monster snake I just tapped it a few times with the anntena of my radio until it was completely inside it's lair.